Come Alive
by Valbonne
Summary: A year has passed since Lili Zwingli has last seen her brother, Vash. But she still harbours the hope that she might find him, wherever he has gone. Just an experimental story, on my part.


All right, it's been a while since I've written any fanfiction, so I might as well try something. I have no idea what I'm writing, so I'm just going to take the plunge and let it lead me somewhere—that's how my best work gets written, anyhow. So, if it doesn't seem organised at all to you… it's not. xD

* * *

It is cold. Cold and dark and empty.

She traces her hand over the marks on the wall, the tips of her fingers quivering as she trails them downward.

It is all she has left of him.

Vash Zwingli, her brother, had gone missing in action about a year ago.

Lili sits in the corner of the dark room, trying to console herself. Trying to assure herself it will be all right, that everything will be fine. Trying to breathe.

Even after a year.

She knows he would come back if he could, and perhaps he was still trying to reach their small home in the Alps. Perhaps he still hadn't made it back. Would she ever know?

Perhaps not.

But she has hope, does she not? Something that's keeping her alive, even on the most grim of mornings, on the stormiest days, during the restless nights tainted by strange and haunting dreams.

Vash couldn't have died.

His country still stands, to this day, the Swiss Confederation. Confoederatio Helvetica.

He's just lost.

She blinks back tears, knowing how adept he is in combat—as well as the avoidance of it.

Their house on the mountainside has been ravaged by the fiery wrath of war, and the enemy has left its mark. Scorch streaks claw their way through the walls, or what remains of them. About three-quarters of the original structure has been turned to rubble, and there is nothing the girl can do to fix it.

Vash would know how to fix it.

Sometimes, she hates herself. For her dependency on her adoptive brother, the one who found her and raised her. She wants to gain strength on her own, to fend for herself. She doesn't want to rely on Vash as much. It must be troubling to have such a helpless sister who cannot even run her own nation without some intervention.

She is Liechtenstein, not part of Switzerland.

Vash is still missing, but a year isn't very long in comparison to the history of the European countries.

And Lili contemplates this for a long while as her fingers wind up at the bottom of the dried smear on the wall.

She can sense that he must still be alive—something she can tell by touching the blood on the wall. It somehow feels alive, even though it's old.

Although she knows not how, she can sense the ghost of a pulse, somewhere off into the distance. A nation's blood is the key to his health, and a faint connection is established—if only for a moment—between Liechtenstein and Switzerland.

Perhaps he will know that she is alive, too.

Hungry, terrified, grief-stricken and injured…

…But she is still alive, and so is he.

And she will fight—not just for her brother, but for herself. For her own people, for her own land. She will stand by her nation and devote every last breath to it.

She is Lili Zwingli, the Principality of Liechtenstein, and she will teach herself anything she has seen Vash do. She will learn it, and she will strategise. She will organise her resources, similarly to how she has seen her brother do, and she will prepare for her time:

Her time to show the world what loyalty means, to both a nation and to family.

And she stands to her feet with an air of solid determination, unwavering. She begins to walk through the house to gather what she has, in preparation for a search. As she walks, the tattered cloak on her shoulder billows with the movement, and the coat-of-arms on it seems to come alive.

Lili stands in front of the wall near to where the blood is, and draws a knife.

If Vash ever returns to this godforsaken place, he should know that she, too, is alive.

_Shiiiing._

The matted blonde locks of her hair fall to the ground beneath the bloodstain, and she feels liberated somehow. It's what men do before heading into battle, and she can somehow understand why.

One small prick, and she swipes her finger across the wall to leave a trace.

The fresh colour is brighter than that of the blood nearby, but it slowly fades into the wall until it blends in more.

Smiling faintly, Lili leaves the room, and her cloak swishes quietly with the motion.

The room is still dark, with recent blood upon its damaged wall. Blonde strands of hair lay in a neat pile until the inadvertent wind from the closing door strews them across the floor, and then they are scattered. And although each lock of hair is still within the room, finding each individual strand would take a lifetime…

…A human's lifetime, but not a nation's.

Finding Vash Zwingli would take as long as gathering every hair on the ground.

But Lili is willing to try.

* * *

**AN:** Sorry for the strange randomness. I don't have enough patience or perseverance to come up with anything longer than a chapter, so there went Skandinavisk Saga... I need to seriously reorganise my thoughts before taking a stab at another chapter of that one. I was going to drop it, but... I have ideas. I've had ideas, just not transitions to fill in between the major parts, and that's what the lame second chapter was. I'll work on it at some point...

This was random, and I didn't even know who the characters would be. So it's pretty much a one-shot, because that's all I ever write...


End file.
